The present invention relates to systems and methods for telemedicine.
Telemedicine is the practice of collaborative medicine over a telecommunication network of sites grouped into hubs and spokes, between consultation providers at hub sites that provide the consultation service, and consulters at spoke sites that request and use the service. In a small setting of telemedicine practice, a plurality of physicians form and work together in a health alliance group to serve either a plurality of clients who are lesser experienced physicians who then serve the local patients, or to serve directly to a plurality of clients who are patients themselves, for extended hours of days of a week, for example, a tele-consultation service that is “24/7” will mean non-stop, “24 hours by 7 days of a week”.
The consultations between two parties that are remote from each other are not well supported using existing solutions. In such consultations, a 1st party as “consulter” looking for solution, and a 2nd party as “consultant”, also referred as “advisor” providing such solution, communicate using audio/video devices and the connected Internet network media (tele-consultation). Existing network telemedicine solutions are based on sophisticated video conference equipment for large network installation, enhanced with workflow medical case management developed around central hubs. The solutions are difficult to set up, expensive to maintain, exposed to bottle-neck weakness at high traffic, and contain a many hidden costs.
For example, at existing central hubs, the effort to setup and maintain a central web portal equipped for high-speed, high quality, multi-media store-forward traffic is lengthy, costly, and requires knowledgeable personnel. Also at the central hub, the network arrangement to service multiple interactive video conference calls typically requires installing specialized network conference equipment that small private practices cannot afford. At satellite spoke sites, the telemedicine devices and equipment marketed by the existing network telemedicine solutions are also designed to work with and for a central hub. They are built to capture and submit unfiltered data to the central hub's database, thus contribute to high-traffic load at the central web portal, and add cost to manage unessential data. Furthermore, these new devices and equipment are not designed to be integrated easily into existing solutions: they typically are prepackaged for a few specialty categories, hence are not adaptable for additional categories beyond their instrumentation. Thus, they are not compatible with existing equipment that are essential to the current practice of many hospitals and clinics around the world.
As discussed in Pulin et al.'s technical report entitled “NAT Traversal in Per-to-Peer Architecture”, peer-to-peer networks are well known for file sharing between multiple computers. They establish virtual tunnels between computers to transfer data, but NATs makes it harder. A NAT, Network Address Translation, is a process which transforms private IP addresses, such as 192.168.2.1, into public addresses, such as 203.0.113.40. The idea is that multiple private addresses can hide behind a single public address and thus virtually enlarge the number of allocable public IP addresses. When an application in the local network establishes a connection to Internet, the packet passes through the NAT which adjusts the IP header and maps an external port to the computer which sent the request. When packets are received from the Internet by the NAT, they are forwarded to the internal host which is mapped to the port on which the packet was received, or dropped if no mapping exists.
High-bandwidth multi-media communication network systems to provide communication service to users and devices behind NAT (network address translator) routers are gaining popularity as users look beyond just simply peer-peer voice communication. U.S. Pat. No. 7,962,627 B2 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,684,397 B2 disclose media and systems for peer-to-peer network address translator (NAT) traversal techniques where the functions of STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP over NAT) and TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) servers are described and disclosed. United States Patent 20100077087 discloses a method and system for a network peer system to collect NAT profile information from other peers and share said NAT profile information to other peers.
In a parallel trend, social network systems coupled with multi-media communication network systems are also known. United States Patent Application 20100146048 discloses social network systems and methods. The system includes at least one computer which provides content to a first group of members and a second group of members. A first portion of the content is associated with a first social network and a second portion of the content is associated with a second social network. The first social network is associated with a first entity, and the first group of members. The first portion of the content includes first member-generated content. The second social network is associated with a second entity and the second group of members. The second portion of the content includes second member-generated content. The computer provides to the first group of members: (i) the first member-generated content, and (ii) at least a portion of the second member-generated content.